The Art of Film

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

This course introduces students to film aesthetics through the analysis of film form and style. The course aims to provide students with a fluency in and understanding of film’s unique language as it evolves technologically, historically and generically. Beyond teaching students how to recognize and describe formal choices and techniques, students will be asked to engage in close readings of films, attending to the greater aesthetic significance and stakes of formal choices and innovations evident within a particular film, directorial oeuvre, period or movement. Understanding form as an extension of content, we will look at the conventions of narrative film, the employment of formal techniques like the close-up, point of view, editing, framing and the use of sound as they function within particular filmic contexts and as they function within film’s systemic languages (like that of continuity editing and genre). Concentrating on questions evoked from early cinema to the present about film’s specificity as an art and technological ability, we will consider the changing role of the spectator in relation to the moving image, how film has evolved technologically, film’s relationship to reality including its reporting and construction of the “real,” as well as how film aesthetics have been employed to build ideology and to break with it. 

syllabus_for_ves_70_the_art_of_film.pdf2.28 MB